I can’t remember this. Now-a-days the inventory in a library is all on computers. So it’s just a scan/bar code type thing.
I’m trying to remember back but I can’t be sure.
If I’m not mistaken didn’t each book have a card in it. Then the librarian took the card out and put another one in with the date due? But I can’t recall how they matched up your card to the book.
If someone could be so kind to let me know how they did it. I’m old enough to remember but I don’t 
You have it right. The library sorted the cards by card catalogue entry number. When you returned it, they found the matching card and out it back on the stacks.
When I first learned to read, you signed your name on the card in the back of the book, and they stamped the due date on a little sheet of paper glued to the card pocket. The librarian kept the card you had signed and filed it alphabetically under the due date. Later, we had card numbers and you put your card number on the card in the back of the book, but otherwise everything else was the same.
The books had a card in it, plus a piece of paper attached to it. The library would take the card and file it. It could have been by catalog number in some libraries, but I remember it being filed by library card number (actually, by borrower’s name, in our library, but it was very small). It could also be filed by due date to make it easier to see who had to be told that books were overdue.
They would stamp the due date in the back of the book.
Later systems would put a slip instead of stamping.
There were several systems, which could involve cards in book pockets and/or library users having cards. One possibility was to have a card in each book, and to take it out, write the user name and/or number on it, together with the due date, and file it behind the circulation desk.
Then there was the problem of what order to file the cards. In order of the call number of the book makes a lot of sense, but what do you do when:
(1) a user calls to ask, “What books do I have out from the library?”
(2) you want to send out notices for the overdue books?
In each case, you need to go through all the book cards – which takes a long time in a large library.
At my local library, I also remember the checkout librarian putting both the main card from the book (which had the due date stamped on it) and your library card onto a tray with some kind of camera mounted overhead, and touching a button. The tray/camera device lit up, and made a sound resembling “eee-DURRRRRR-eee”. I saw this system in the 1970s and 1980s.
When I checked out books as a kid in New York in the 1950s, as I recall they would put the book, open to the card holder page, and your library card together in a machine that would photograph them both together. This would provide their record of who had checked out the book. They would put a stamped card in the pocket in the book to let you know when it was due. IIRC correctly, they retained the card that was in the pocket in the book in a file. (I would guess they were filed by due date.) When you brought the book back, they could find the card in the file to see if it was overdue. They could also look up overdue books and match them to the photo to see who had them out.
Back in the 1960s I worked in a library that took microfilm of cards from books alongside library cards and a punched card that contained a due date. After the due date the returned punch cards could be sorted to see what books were missing and therefore overdue and then read on the microfilm to produce a match to the card.
You didn’t really keep track of what books were out, though. If a book wasn’t on the shelf, it wasn’t available.
Computers entered the system in the mid-1980s.
I’m sure each library or library system had some individual variation on tracking books to cards before then. Librarians are top-notch at organization.
But how did they match it up to your particular card? That’s what I can’t remember. It seems they took the card out of the book. OK fine. Now the librarian has my card and the card from the book. Now I know she didn’t write the card number on the card form the book.
I guess that is what I’m not following.
You’ve got the basic details right. In the most primitive systems (i.e., like the one in my elementary school library), each book had a card in a pocket inside one of the covers. If you wanted to check out a book, you would take it to the librarian and present it along with your library card. The librarian would copy your name onto the book’s card, stamp it and a “due date” card with the appropriate date, put the “due date” card in the book’s pocket, give the book to you, and file the book’s card away somewhere. When you returned the book, the librarian would find the appropriate card, put it back in the book’s pocket, and re-shelve the book.
This would work well if the average patron didn’t have a large number of books to check out at once. I would assume that higher-circulation libraries might have had machines that printed your name (or some other identifier) on the book cards, rather than having to write it out by hand a dozen times; however, I don’t remember this specifically.
I always remember that the book’s cards were kind of fascinating — they were like little personal histories of each book, with a name being added every time it was checked out. With privacy concerns being what they are these days, it seems doubtful to me that such a scheme would be acceptable now.
This seems like an awful lot of trouble. Where in NY was this?
Growing up in a small school district it was interesting to see the names on the card pocket in the book of the people who had checked out the book. You could see upper-classmen, older brothers and sisters, maybe even somebody’s parent.
That sounds really expensive. A photo every time a book was checked out. Were these film cameras?
My library card when I was a kid (60s and 70s) had a little metal plate with my name and card number on it. The librarian would put my card and the card from the book pocket into different slots on this big metal machine and pull a lever, making a nice loud “ka-Chunk” sound. In my vague memory, I think what happened there was it applied a bit of ink to the plate on my card, then smashed it into the book’s card to stamp my info on it, so they knew I was the one reading Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Football.
Of their filing and tracking system, though, I know not.
Sounds like a similar system to what I wrote about. They had cartridges that could just be swapped in and out. I’m remembering them as microfilm, but they could have just taken regular pictures.
You have to balance expense with the ability to use these over an entire library system, which allowed you to return books anywhere and not just at the library you took them out of, the ability to track overdue and missing books, the ability to sort cards to extract data, and probably a whole bunch of things that as a page I don’t know about. And it was very fast to use. I could take a stack of books and get them all checked out in a matter of seconds. That had to be helpful.
Now balance that against a hand system, in which every book has to be stamped as it goes out and then matched individually to cards as they get returned. (The punch cards with the due date go to a central sorter to be used over an over.)
The gain in time and efficiency alone was probably worth the expense and being able to better charge for overdue or missing books probably paid for the system all by itself.
You may be assuming that the film was developed into prints as a matter of course. Processing microfilm into a negative isn’t terribly expensive, as things go.
I was just thinking of the film itself. I seem to recall buying film for my camera was expensive. I guess slow black and white film was not that costly.
I grew up in Berkeley CA and our public libraries were using the photograph system back in the 1970s (at least).
When I lived in England in 1979-1980 you had library tickets - 5 little tickets with your name on them and you gave one to the librarian for each book that you were checking out. You’d have to return the book to the same branch that you borrowed it from to get your ticket back.
That’s right – the film itself, as opposed to the canister it’s rolled onto, the box the roll goes in, the inventory space and process involved in keeping it on a photo supply store shelf, etc., is pretty darn cheap. Processing negatives (color or B&W, since even though the chemicals for color are more expensive overall, economies of scale bring th two in line with each other) is fairly cheap. Printing is much more expensive than all that other stuff. And with microfilm, you can get many (thousands?) of book records on the equivalent of a roll of print film.
Film was used for lots of other records-keeping before digitization, in part because it could be done cheaply.
When I was an active photographer in the late 80s ad early 90s, I saved money, as was common, by buying big rolls of (cheap) raw film, cutting it into 36-exposure lengths, and rolling it onto reusable rolls. IIRC, I could special-order a big roll – they came in metal canisters about 6" across – for around the cost of two or three rolls of film from the corner store.
This matches how the local library worked when I was growing up in Scotland. Each book had a little cardboard pocket glued into it, a small card with the details of it tucked into that and a separate sheet glued in the front. Your “library tickets” consisted of several similar cardboard pockets, each with your name on it.
To check out a book, you presented it with a ticket to the librarian. They removed the small card from the pocket in the book and put it in the pocket on the ticket. They then stamped the return date on the sheet in the book and handed it back to you to take away. Your ticket, now holding the card with the book details on it, was then filed in a tray labelled with the return date.
You got your ticket back when you returned the book. The librarian would look at the sheet inside to see the return date and then find the filed ticket in the appropriate tray. The card would go back into the book and they’d hand the empty ticket to you. So usually the only time you were in physical possession of the ticket was while browsing in the library.
The neat aspect was presumably that this made it easy to identify what was overdue - the librarian just had to look at the tickets + cards in the trays for return dates in the past.